


Notifiable Incident

by nice_girls_play



Category: The Young Ones (TV 1982)
Genre: Child Abuse, M/M, Panic Attacks, Serious Injuries, Vyvyan is unsure of Dream Rick's gender and preferred pronouns, mention of Crossdressing, mentions of dream sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:26:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5887663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nice_girls_play/pseuds/nice_girls_play
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abuse is systemic and has a long line of progenitors, even among people who are just trying their best. Vyvyan hates the lot of them. He might not hate Rick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notifiable Incident

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on FF.net and at the [Young Ones Slash LJ community](http://tyo-slash.livejournal.com) in 2006.

Vyvyan didn't dream very often. He tended to fall into a dead sleep once he made it up to his room at the end of the day, either too inebriated or too worn out for his brain to hiccup any enduring images. 

But when he did dream, they were always a bit... wonky. 

Tonight he was back at his old school, waiting outside the headmaster's office to be bawled out for… something. Who knew what? He'd been there so many times over the years, for running away, for getting into fights with other boys, for smoking in the lavatory. From the look of his hands and clothes, he'd guess the grand offense this time was vandalism. Was he fourteen or fifteen? He'd gone quite mad with a can of spray paint for a while there and the days and months had started to blur together on a cloud of hydrocarbons and boredom. 

The person across from him slurped on an ice lolly, sucking so hard it hollowed out their cheeks -- gray-blue eyes locked on Vyvyan's -- only to have it torn from their hand by a passing prefect.

"No sweets before dinner, Miss Pratt."

Vyvyan laughed at Rick's wide-eyed, flustered disgust.

As prissy as he was, Rick didn't make a particularly convincing girl: a noticeable dusting of tawny hair covered his legs above his dark knee socks. He had an erection tenting his green tartan uniform skirt. He would probably fall on his face if he tried to stand up in the four-inch heels he was wearing. However, the proper pigtails tied with yellow ribbons and pert tits beneath his school blazer were proper girlie issue.

Vyvyan didn't know which he wanted to do first: yank or squeeze. He finally grabbed one in each hand, not sure how or when he'd crossed the hall. Dream Rick tore the blouse open and started grinding against his thigh; opening his mouth wide Vyvyan stuck his tongue down his (her?) throat.

"Mr. Basterd, Miss Pratt, would you kindly contain yourselves until after first period?"

Vyvyan was about to tell the old fucker to sod off when his here-to-fore very enjoyable dream was interrupted by a stray elbow landing in his ribs...

\--

Fucking hell. Vyvyan rubbed his eyes, blinking hard against the intruding sunlight and resisting the urge to punch the squirming lump pressed into his side on the bed.

He'd gotten used to mornings like this one, waking up with wiry limbs draped over him and lank, musty-smelling hair under his chin or itching the back of his neck. Rick, he thought, in his quieter moments often looked like a 12-year-old, much nerdier John Hurt; splayed out like a science project, waiting for the alien larvae to burst from his chest. It was fascinating just to stare at him in that state, taking in each detail until Rick inevitably woke up and started running off at the mouth.

Like now. 

His housemate stirred against his shoulder, awakening with a sniff and lifting his head to blearily stare at the punk's neck, his chin, his left ear, a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 

“WHAT?"

"Nothing!" Rick shot back defensively. Coughing thickly and clearing his throat, he stroked Vyvyan's arm, reached under the covers for his hand. "Good morning to you, too."

It still took a lot of restraint to keep from pushing Rick's hands away when he reached for him. The softness of it was nice even as it was unfamiliar and vaguely repellant. The touch of Rick's fingers on his chest and shoulder that first morning had resulted in the poet being thrown across the room. No explanation was given and Rick had nervously laughed off the blow at the time, just limping back to his feet and sheepishly climbing back under the covers. Forcing himself to not pull back or push away was getting easier. He turned his hand over, entwining their fingers.

"Good afternoon, probably," he murmured, noting the stretch of sunlight across the floor boards. 

“Hmm. Did you sleep all right?”

“No. I had the worst dream. I was back at school and you were wearing a skirt.”

Rick sat up, glaring down at him.

“Well, actually that bit was pretty good,” Vyvyan smirked.

"Pervy.”

“Lucky for you.”

"Lucky for me you trimmed your nails recently. Scratches hurt, Vyvyan!" He shoved down the bedclothes in a huff, pulling Vyvyan’s arm across his lap. 

"Of course they hurt! What would be the point if they didn't hurt?" Vyvyan leaned back against the pillow, smirk receding to a small smile as he watched Rick wriggle into a seated position, bare back exposing the red cross-hatching his newly blunted nails had left behind. It had been a good night. He wondered if he could persuade Rick to stay settled down long enough to make it a good morning...

“Oh, stupid me! I forgot who I was talking to for a moment... How on Earth did you get this scar here?" he asked, brow furrowed, turning his wrist over to show him (as if he didn't already know it was there).

Vyvyan's face fell, along with the bottom of the room (possibly the house... possibly the planet).

It was pretty standard now: Rick's early-as-fuck, "morning-after" chit-chat. As mundane and routine as shaking the bits out of the bed sheets or filling in the chalky white stains on his jeans and vest with a magic marker.

It was a bit of a pain -- had been a pain from the very beginning, months before. Rick, who was obviously never told to put his toys away as a child, seemed to get a rise out of talking Vyvyan to death. His life before moving into the share house proved to be fertile ground for the anarchist's limited imagination: prodding and poking and scratching for bits of his life with a kind of smitten, fascinated awe, all the while cleverly managing to never offer up anything of himself to share.

Not that Vyvyan had ever asked Rick either; never poked and pried with the raw, exposed need the poet seemed to have by the sodding truck-load. He knew everything he needed to about Rick and what he didn’t know was easily guessed -- such as Rick's reaction to any clampdown on Vyvyan's part. He'd predicted the familiar childish rants, the bristling, silent protests and, eventually, the relief and delight as Vyvyan finally drew out his answer to each question, easing the mutilation by wrapping his arms around a pair of squirming shoulders or biting a trembling neck. 

Nothing was laughed off now -- he couldn't get away with saying something about how he'd gotten ALL of his scars on Earth, thank you very much. Everything was taken so bloody seriously. And it didn't stop at where he went to school, the first girl he ever got a snog off of, had he ever snogged any other lads, other house mates, other hamsters, and where'd he get this scar on his wrist? Like pulling the heads off of those bloody Russian dolls, each answer seemed to lead to a new question, smaller and less significant than the one before it. But those were the ones Rick seemed to cling to with even more ferocity than the answers to the larger ones. 

After the first few times, it didn't seem to matter to him that Vyv went to King’s (thanks to an ex of his mum’s who’d gamed the system to get him a free spot and a meager fund from an older woman he distantly recalled being told was his grandmother -- but, on balance, probably wasn't). Yes, he was the first lad Vyvyan had snogged ( _ish_ , that Rutger Hauer poster and Stasha, the boyish girl he’d briefly trysted with in fourth form, didn’t count) or that the scar on his wrist was from when his cast was cut off. 

He felt the answer perched on the back of his tongue, lips sealed tight. Letting it escape could lead to nowhere good, because it wouldn't stop there. Rick would have to know 'what cast? Did you break your arm? How did you break your arm?'

"Vyv?"

"Beating it," he finally said, "got snagged on my zip."

Rick rolled his eyes.

"Be serious, Vyvyan."

Annoyed (and more than a little dizzy from the imaginary line of questioning) he used Rick's grip on his arm to tug him back down to the mattress. He swooped in to nip at the anarchist's pouty lower lip, moving south along his jaw and towards his neck.

The usual methods didn't seem to be cutting it this morning. He bruised the skin in two places and the sociology student was still blathering on above him. 

"Oh... d-don't think you're going to distract me that way. Vyvyan!," the last few syllables ending with a pained squeak. "Vyvyan?"

This time, he did stop, shoving the poet over until he tumbled to the floor and leaning over to stare down at his bewildered face.

"You really want to bloody know?"

\--  
_  
Cyprian was a huge, bulky Glaswegian who'd spent the previous fifteen years playing rugby, getting into street fights and gaining a reputation for being a generally nasty bloke. He looked like he should have been dragging his knuckles behind him on the pavement everywhere he walked. His mum had met him working security for some down-market boutique she'd ripped off in the shopping district._

_There wasn't much Cyp liked. He could go on for hours into the night about all the things he hated: the price of petrol, the dilapidated car he drove, the job he was promptly sacked from shortly after moving in with Vyv's mum, the size of the flat all three of them lived in. He had a habit of preceding everybody's name with the word 'fucking,' which came out sounding more like 'fookin' after he'd had a few drinks. His mum was "Fookin' Valerie." Vyvyan was "the fookin' kid."_

_He liked cards. Vyvyan remembered that quite clearly. He had several decks from several shops in all different colors and designs stacked up on the chipped charity shop end table in the living room by the time nine-year-old Vyvyan had returned for the Christmas holiday. It only took knocking over one stack of uncased cards -- green, bearing the legend from a topless bar in Kent -- scattering them to the four winds, and two fifths of vodka to get Cyp really angry. Fueled by the alcohol and a little more than the usual casual distaste, he'd pulled the young boy up from the floor by his arm, twisting it when Vyvyan had tried to get away and easily snapping the bone below his elbow and above the wrist._

_"Well that's what you get, isn't it?" his mum had asked as her son continued to rub at his pained, swollen arm two days after it'd happened._

_Doreen, the teaching student who lived two floors up from them, fashioned him a sling to wear when he returned to school after the holiday. Dori was several inches shorter and two or three stone heavier than his mum, fleshy curves to the older woman's jagged edges. Sometimes she invited Vyvyan up for a sandwich when his mum was at work, nicking clothes and other items from the various shops downtown. It wasn't all out of the kindness of her heart. She'd been dealing out of her flat to cover her school expenses and couldn't take the chance that the pigs would show up at her door asking questions, even for the hungry little boy getting batted about downstairs._

_It had been for nothing in the end. Everyone got caught eventually._

_His black eye had faded by the time he started the winter term, a yellowish clot of purple and gray tissue under a blue-green iris. The long scratch on the back of his head from when his mum caught him with a broken bottle was scabbed over and starting to itch underneath his bushy, chin-length blond hair. But it was the sling he presumed -- and the poorly-healed arm encased in it -- that got the most attention.  
He remembered the clandestine nature of it all, like those crap repeats of The Prisoner on ITV. One of the prefects fetched him from his bed at half past one in the morning and ushered him -- still in his pajamas -- down to the headmaster's office, where the vice headmaster, his block counselor, and the night nurse from the infirmary were all waiting. _

_The camera they used had a large flash cube that exploded inside his drowsy head like a nuclear blast, the burnt smell of electrons clinging to his nostrils. They took photographs of his arm, the sling, the burst blood vessel in his right eye, the bruises that circled his upper arms. The nurse trimmed a short landing strip across the back of his head to get to the scab, not being mindful enough to leave some long hair to cover it later. Afterwards, she took him into the toilet and had him strip down to his underpants (and further) to check for any other possible damage._

_This excursion was followed by an early morning visit to casualty, where his arm was x-rayed and cased in plaster that would need to stay on for the next eight weeks._

_He tore the cast off himself three weeks later, when the itching became unbearable: striking at it with fingernails, a brittle, pen blade from art studio and, finally, a small boning knife nicked from the kitchen that had sliced through his wrist much easier than the plaster. His arm still throbbed sometimes when it rained..._

\--

He recounted every detail with a kind of preemptive sadism, anxiously waiting for the blade to fall and for Rick to turn tail and bolt from the room. 

That was what he wanted, wasn't it? For the nasty tale he was spinning to turn that scattered, half-empty skull into a chamber of horrors from which the sheltered sociology student would never recover.

Instead, Rick just sat there on the floor, unnaturally still; already huge eyes growing wider, the color disappearing from his face leaving him chalky, ghostly pale. His lips were pursed with nausea and it made Vyvyan want to punch him right in the mouth -- knock that broad smile down his throat and watch him choke to death on his own enormous front teeth.

But Vyv wasn't Cyp. He wasn't going to pound the blubbering boy who -- through the looking glass of a few lagers or a moderate panic attack -- might actually deserve it. He'd go across the hall and wallop Neil with his bat. He _definitely_ didn't deserve it. 

So that's exactly what he did, leaving Rick to stew in whatever kept him rooted to the spot on the stained floor and slamming the door behind him.

Fuck him, he thought as he shoved Neil off the window sill he was lounging on and into the hedge below. He'd asked. And who did he think he was to ask, anyway? Just because they shagged and fell asleep together almost every night didn't make him his bloody boyfriend. Vyvyan didn't owe him an anything. He wasn't fucking _responsible_ for him...

\--

_A few weeks after the trip to the hospital came the meeting with his gin-pocked, rather staid headmaster. The only time any student ever saw the bastard was when he was well-protected behind the barricade of his antique desk, fat stuffed into a charcoal wool suit, skin gray and faded like the framed photo of Edward Heath he had hanging on the wall opposite the lead-framed windows. He'd called Vyvyan into his office during the last half of his lunch break. There were bits of toast and blackcurrant jam still stuck in his beard as he spoke._

_"Young man, we're going to keep you over the holiday before the next term," he said, jowls flapping distractedly as he attempted to maintain decorum in the face of the situation._

_And that was it. No one ever said anything else. From there, it was just understood that Vyvyan would be kept over during all of the school holidays, until summer when his usual bunk was replaced with a sagging cot in a residence hall. His mum was replaced with Sally, a tall gray-eyed girl from the DES office who'd oversee his case for the next nine years._

_Her cheques from the department kept him -- reluctantly -- in school. Her yellow Ford Taunus tended to show up on the scene whenever he ran away to the city or one of his science projects exploded. Once in a while, she took him to a foster home, usually returning within a day or two when, one by one, each family hit the panic button._

_Sally had stuck it out, making sure he passed his A Levels, finding a school that would give him a grant and sitting out the long hours with him and the careers officer, carefully picking out a specialty for him while he distracted himself by shredding the arms of his chair with a switch blade._

_Of all the cunts that had pretended to care, she'd been maybe the best at it. But even Sally disappeared once her job was finished. Somewhere buried in his room was a Christmas card she'd sent him during his first year at college. No robins, snowfall, or fat fucker in a red jacket surrounded by squalling kids and "Best Wishes" -- she'd known him better than that. Instead, he had gotten a Ralph Steadman card with a mad-looking Cheshire cat on the front, smiling a cool smile that reminded him of Michael under the exasperated stare of an Alice that reminded him of Rick, splattered with red and black ink blots._

_‘Stay out of trouble’ was written on the inside in Sally’s careful handwriting._

_For the first two years, he'd kept it under his bed, mashed between the frame and the wall. The third year, he'd torn the cover off the card and filled in Alice's eyes with a silver graphite pencil, pressing down so hard the point tore through the paper..._

\--

It was nearly four by the time Vyvyan returned to his room.

Rick's eyes hadn't changed much since he'd left him that morning, same unblinking watery gray-blue gaze. That was a lie -- they were puffy and rimmed red. Softer too as he looked up at Vyvyan standing in the doorway. Softer and slightly less fearful. 

He had also moved from the floor to the bed, sitting on the edge of the mattress, with his elbows balanced on his knees, his chin propped in the palms of his hands. The sound of the door shutting was quiet compared to the slam it had been delivered that morning.

Vyvyan felt his stomach drop through the floor.

_Are you happy now, you girlie sod? Does it make you feel good, knowing something like that? Knowing that you had the big house and the doting mum and apron strings tied around your wrists so you couldn't wander off and no bruises or busted limbs or box of flashy shoved in your face, but you still ended up here with me?_

"Aren't you going to say anything?"

Vyvyan hadn't realized that Rick had gotten up and moved to stand next to him. 

But that wasn't true either. He wasn't standing. Rick hadn't moved at all. _He_ was the tosser who'd moved to sit next to Rick on the bed. And the sociology student had curled into his side, his arm tucked into his, chin resting on his shoulder. No fear behind those eyes now.

It took all of five seconds before Vyvyan pushed him back on the bed, tucking his face into Rick’s shoulder as he followed him down.

\--

"Um... I-I used to wee in my bed at night."

Vyvyan lifted his head from the pillow to stare at the boy in his arms, wrapped around him from chest to back.

"You're just telling me this now?"

"Well I never used to do it at home. Just when I was away... At school."

Vyvyan stared, dumbfounded, for a moment, feeling a fit of hysterical laughter begin to rise the length of his entire body. 

"It started when I was eight--"

"Just tell me it's ended."

"You know bloody well it has! Will you shut up and let me finish the story, Vyvyan?"

"All right, I'm sorry," his lips grazed the side of Rick's forehead briefly before he pulled back. "Go on, then."

"Anyway..," Rick hesitated before continuing. "The first time it happened, it was the second night I spent at primary school. It was horrible. Mum switched me over to the day school after that. Then when I was twelve, she thought we'd try it again and sent me to Pocklington."

Vyvyan made an effort to listen, twirling one of Rick’s pigtails around his fingers and biting the inside of his cheek. 

"It happened again the very first night. But Daddy had already paid for a full year's tuition this time and wouldn't let me switch out, so I didn't have a choice. I stopped all liquids at lunch time and prayed for a miracle. Eventually it just sort of … went away on its own, I suppose. But I was a day boy again by then, so overnight stays weren’t really an issue -- damn it, Vyvyan, stop laughing!"

The outburst only made Vyvyan laugh harder. Rick sat upright in a huff, clutching the end of the duvet against his chest. As he attempted to climb over his bedmate to reach the floor, Vyvyan reached out an arm and hauled him back down, still giggling. Rick harrumphed, indignant, burrowing his face between Vyvyan's neck and the pillow.

"Rick."

"Yeah?"

"Why the hell are you telling me this now?"

"Well... you're still in bed with me, aren't you?"

Vyvyan thought about that for a long moment before swatting Rick lightly on the back of his neck.

"Go to sleep, you girlie bastard."

"Happily, you fascist," Rick murmured, fatigue pulling him under. "You don't need to _re-live something_ to make me believe you, you know." 

"You don't need to ask so many stupid questions early in the morning," Vyvyan replied, his own eyes slipping closed. "Or afternoon."

"Well, when am I supposed to ask them? Is there a..." he paused, his question bisected by a yawn, "... preferred time table I should be made aware of?"

"I'll let you know," Vyvyan said, finally, sleep overtaking him.

\--

That night, Vyvyan dreamed he was bending Rick over his headmaster's desk, tartan skirt hiked up, yellow ribbons still in his hair.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted under another title, specifically a four-letter-word Vyvyan uses in the text. The text itself ended up being more heavily revised than I initially intended (I couldn’t quite put down the pen once I’d picked it up and the boys wouldn't be quiet) and it still might need another edit. The DES is now called the Department for Education. A notifiable incident is the term used to describe an incident in which a child dies or serious harm is suspected. 
> 
> In the original story, I used Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson's actual schools for Rick and Vyv's schools... but swapped them for some reason. No idea why -- it was 2006. I was likely working on an honor's thesis, perpetually overwhelmed and under-caffeinated.


End file.
